When you’re searching for information, speed matters. We’re always thinking about how to shave milliseconds from every search you do, throughout our products. Last year, we started testing a feature in Chrome to make searching from a new tab faster and simpler. If you use Chrome’s Developer or Beta installs, you may have already seen this in action. Many thanks for your feedback, which has helped us continue to hone the look and feel, and improve average time from query to answer — meaning you can find what you’re looking for even more quickly than before.

These early results are encouraging but we’re still turning dials under the hood. While we work we’ll be expanding to a small set of people using the stable channel of Chrome on Windows, Mac and Chromebooks, who have Google set as default search engine. As this experimental feature includes open APIs, any search engine may integrate with the new ‘new tab’ page in Chrome. Keep the feedback coming.

WebGL is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics and 2D graphics. It is now enabled by default in Chrome for Android Beta running on devices with high-end mobile GPUs (this includes Nexus 4 and Nexus 7). Try it out with this racer WebGL demo and others:

The MediaSource API allows JavaScript to generate media streams for playback, which enables use cases such as adaptive streaming and time-shifting live streams. It is now enabled by default in Chrome for Android running on Jellybean or higher. This API is especially useful for streaming to mobile devices, where connectivity is often constrained and unpredictable. Play with it on this demo page.

Chrome will now match the behavior of IE and not honor the Refresh header or tags when the URL to be refreshed to has a javascript: scheme. This is done to close down one more XSS vector against poorly constructed sites.

Two new experimental features landed behind a flag on Chrome for Android: Web Speech API (recognition) and the Vibration API.

One of Google’s core security principles is to engage the community, to better protect our users and build relationships with security researchers. We had this principle in mind as we launched our Chromium and Google Web Vulnerability Reward Programs. We didn’t know what to expect, but in the three years since launch, we’ve rewarded (and fixed!) more than 2,000 security bug reports and also received recognition for setting leading standards for response time.

The collective creativity of the wider security community has surpassed all expectations, and their expertise has helped make Chrome even safer for hundreds of millions of users around the world. Today we’re delighted to announce we’ve now paid out in excess of $2,000,000 (USD) across Google’s security reward initiatives. Broken down, this total includes more than $1,000,000 (USD) for the Chromium VRP / Pwnium rewards, and in excess of $1,000,000 (USD) for the Google Web VRP rewards.

Today, the Chromium program is raising reward levels significantly. In a nutshell, bugs previously rewarded at the $1,000 level will now be considered for reward at up to $5,000. In many cases, this will be a 5x increase in reward level! We’ll issue higher rewards for bugs we believe present a more significant threat to user safety, and when the researcher provides an accurate analysis of exploitability and severity. We will continue to pay previously announced bonuses on top, such as those for providing a patch or finding an issue in a critical piece of open source software.

Web Lab was hosted both physically in the museum and virtually online. We learned a lot about building physical exhibits that interact with App Engine and use the latest web technology in Chrome to let users control real hardware. Now that we've open sourced the code, we're excited to show you how we did it.

The OrchestraThe Orchestra was made up of eight custom-built robotic instruments that let you make music with others from anywhere in the world. Now, you can use the same code that was deployed in the exhibit and host your own miniature Orchestra. All you'll need is an Arduino and the plans for a new dinky replica we created especially for this open source project. We have even integrated WebRTC so you can form your own band from anywhere in the world. Don’t worry if you're not a hardware expert because we have a full software version too.

The SketchbotThe Sketchbot was an electronic arm that received over 5,000 commands per second to etch an outline of your face in the sand. The Open Source project includes the code and the hardware designs to build a replica of the Web Lab. For developers like me who are soldering iron challenged, we have also included instructions and code to build a BergCloud LittlePrinter and a pure software only version.

If you’ve got the maker itch and want to build a Web Lab replica, integrate hardware that we had never envisaged, or are just curious about how we made the Web Lab, you can grab the code from Github.
Be sure to share what you do with the code in our G+ Community.

As web developers, it’s important to stay up to date about the evolution of the web. A few months ago we started a simple dashboard on chromestatus.com to track new feature development within Blink. It’s become a valuable tool for us, so today we’re excited to introduce the first iteration of a new, easier-to-use version.

The dashboard is designed to encourage transparency and to consolidate web platform feature tracking. For each feature, it shows useful details such as:

A short description and owner email address

Implementation status in Chromium

Progress through the standards process

Our understanding of the opinion of other browser vendors

Values are associated with a shade of red, yellow, or green based on how they affect the likelihood that a feature will ship in other browsers. For example, the entry for CSS Flexbox is entirely green, indicating that the spec is stable and publicly endorsed by other browser vendors. In general, we like to see a lot of green because it indicates that we’re minimizing compatibility risk and preserving the interoperability that makes the web platform so powerful.

This is the first iteration of the new version, and we plan to explore different ways of exposing the data, including a better aggregate view. If you’re curious, the code is available on Github. We used a new framework called Polymer, which is built on the emerging Web Components standards. Although Polymer is in early development, we decided this was a perfect place to experiment with it.

The Chrome Web Store has become the home for many different apps, extensions, websites, and themes from a wide variety of publishers. Until now, the Chrome Web Store was only able to associate a single email address with a publisher’s account, which made it challenging to give more than one person access to the account to manage the inventory. That’s why today we’re introducing Group Publishing, a new feature intended to simplify the management of multiple people accessing an organization’s CWS account.

Many organizations have multiple items that they need to manage—updates need to be published, testers need to be assigned, promotional images need to be rotated, marketing text needs to be tweaked, and so on. With the addition of this much-requested feature, an organization can simply create a Google Group and designate it as the account owner, then add and remove people from the Group as needed.

On the developer dashboard page, click the link to either associate an existing group as the Group Publisher, or create a new one:

Members of a given group can add, edit, and otherwise work with the store items and overall account-related properties that the particular group has responsibility for.

With the new Group Publishing capability, an organization’s engineering, marketing and product management teams can now collaborate much more effectively to better manage their Chrome Web Store presence. Have questions about this or any other Chrome Web Store Feature? We always welcome your feedback on our G+ Developers page or our developer forum.

With Chrome DevTools our goal is to make your experience as a web developer as productive as possible. In the most recent version of Chrome we've added three major new features that will improve your authoring experience more than ever before.

Within Workspaces you can load complete local filesystem folders (including back-end files such as scripts and build/deployment files) into the DevTools editor and map these to network resources. This enables you to author and tweak your scripts and styles, instantly see those changes reflected in the browser and have them transparently persist to disk—no more switching back and forth between browser and editor. The editor now supports syntax highlighting for a number of languages including PHP, Python, Java, CSS, HTML and of course JavaScript.

CSS preprocessor mapping

CSS preprocessors like Sass make it easier to organize your CSS, but until now tweaking your styles required switching to another program and refreshing Chrome. CSS preprocessor mapping enables live-editing of these sources directly within the Sources panel. To see it in action, just map the .scss file, then Ctrl-click on a property or value to jump to the variable, mixin or function that defined it. Support for other pre-processors such as Less, Stylus and Compass is in the works. Refer to the improved DevTools css-preprocessor documentation for more details and setup instructions.

Snippets

There are times when you want to be able to save smaller scripts, bookmarklets and utilities so that you always have them available while debugging in the browser. Snippets is a new DevTools feature that makes it possible. It allows you to create, store and run JavaScript within the Sources tab. It gives you a multi-line console with syntax-highlight and persistence, making it convenient for prototyping code that is more than a one-liner. There's also a community-curated repository of snippets for developers that contains useful snippets such as color pickers, CSS prettyfiers, logging helpers and much more.